Efficient interventions for struggling readers

When tutoring a struggling reader, teachers may hope to see marked improvement in six weeks. But Cindy Kanuch, reading specialist at Calhan Elementary School in Calhan, Colo., says that if the intervention is precise enough, improvement can be evident in just one week.

Kanuch stressed that assessing the student’s reading deficit was key, because it saves valuable time when providing an intervention. She highly recommended using the free downloadable diagnostic tests from ReallyGreatReading.com.

Kanuch also stressed how important it is to focus on the correct skill deficit. This involves digging to the student’s lowest level of competency and building from there, using a skill chart she provided. (See graphic below.)

For example, if a student is having problems with comprehension, you should check the skills in fluency, vocabulary, and background knowledge. Under fluency, there’s phonics, phonemic awareness, and oral language. And there’s more to it. For example, if the problem is fluency, look at the errors. Is accuracy low? Or is fluency low because they are slow readers? Or is prosody lacking (reading aloud with feeling)? Each requires a different intervention.

Building Oral Language Skills

The spoken language can be an issue for ESL (English as a Second Language) and low-SES (socioeconomic status) students. Kanuch advised having students listen to grade-level text through audiobooks. She recommended going to LearningAlly.com, which has a library of over 80,000 audiobooks which can be filtered in a variety of ways, including by grade level. LearningAlly.org has a yearly membership fee. Also see the SpecialEdTech.net article “Finding and creating audio books”.

Kanuch also suggested creating opportunities to practice oral communication skills in class. For example, when you ask the class a question, do a “turn and talk” — put the students in pairs and give them permission to tell each other an answer. Then have each student report on what his or her partner said. Verbal games such as “I Spy” and “20 Questions” can also strengthen skills.

Building Phonemic Awareness

Kanuch advised noting student errors as they read aloud so you determine areas of confusion. For example, are they pronouncing letters correctly? What about prefixes and suffixes? Are they adding or omitting sounds or mixing them up? Kanuch provided a chart of phonemic awareness skills which you see (among others) by clicking on this link. She suggested playing games as a class where you practice saying words and then drop a letter (for example, say “best” and then drop the “s”. Or pronounce a word backwards.

Kanuch said it was important for students to feel success, and that you should repeatedly use key words that students will recognize. Instead of giving the student “rules” about how the words should sound, she recommended suggesting some “expectations” and letting students discover which words match these expectations, regarding the pronunciation of adjacent letters, syllable types, accents, and a letter’s position in a word. For example, point out that the silent “e” on the end of the word “geese” is needed so the word isn’t the plural “gees”. This helps students figure out why words are spelled the way they are.

Interventions for Phonics

Kanuch advocated using sound-by-sound blending when teaching reading. For example, when teaching the word “step” first you would have the student blend the “s” and the “t”. Once that sound is mastered, have them blend “st” and “e”. Finally, have them blend “ste” and “p”. This way the student only has to blend two sounds at a time.

There are two low-cost teaching tools which are good for this type of reading instruction: Scrabble Slam!, which can be found anywhere toys are sold, and Phonics FlipCards, sold for $5 at ReallyGreatReading.com. Flash cards can be helpful too. Kanuch will post the words on a bulletin board have have two students play a game where they race to swat the spoken word with a flyswatter.

Syllable decoding, or recognizing the six types of syllables, really helps students unlock words, said Kanuch. She noted that even the youngest students benefit from this practice. The chart below is from ReadingRockets.org and you can get a more colorful chart from https://thisreadingmama.com/6-syllable-types-resource-pack/ . (Editor’s Note: We have suggested additional resources not mentioned by Kanuch.)

Interventions for Fluency

To help with fluency, Kanuch recommended repeated reading of a controlled text, with feedback from a listener. She suggested having the students read for one minute cold, then take time to note and figure out the words they couldn’t decode, and then read it once again. Here are some other strategies:

Modeled reading/listening to reading

Reading along with audio

Chunking/phrasing: Cut the text into phrases and have students put it in order, reading the first phrase, then repeating the first phrase while they add a second phrase, etc

Have a reader’s theater with short plays, and read the dialogue. For ideas, see reader’s theater books featured on www.aaronshep.com. You cannot buy the books there but they are available on Amazon.

Tell the student to read in character, for example like a pirate, vampire or queen

Have students change inflection as they read. For example, I saw it, I SAW it, I saw IT

Have a “guess my punctuation” class exercise, where students read the sentence and classmates guess which punctuation the sentence has. This is especially good for students who tend to read through the periods.

Interventions for Vocabulary

Teach root words, prefixes,and suffixes, the 20 most common of each.

Have students break words down into roots and make word matrices

Check out the board game “Roots of Power,” available from TheGameCrafter.com, which teaches Greek and Latin word roots while relaying child-friendly excerpts of Greek myths